A website’s goal is to provide inbound leads and visibility for your business. To accomplish that goal, your website needs to continually deliver a pleasant user experience to those who are looking for your products and services.
WordPress provides robust functionality and ease of use features, making it the ideal choice for businesses that want to keep their website content up-to-date and relevant to their target market. This dynamic, open source software has evolved into an easy to use content management system, putting you in control of your content.
As more people are visiting websites from their smartphones than web browsers, it is important that your website be able to support a broad range of devices. Google began to index websites using its Mobile Index in 2018. As of March 2021, websites must support mobile otherwise you risk being removed from the index.
There are several ways to implement mobile device support for your website. For most small businesses, creating your website using responsive design is the easiest and most cost effective means to achieve this mobile-friendly goal. Responsive design means that your website serves the same HTML code to all devices along with different CSS style rules to optimize the site’s interface across the varying devices.
A mobile-friendly website works seamlessly across different devices. It means your website has the ability to adapt to being visited on a mobile device rather than a desktop. If you look at your website from your desktop browser, a tablet or your smartphone, you should have a good experience regardless of which device you are on.
However, being mobile-friendly is not enough.
Mobile first design refers to creating your website for the mobile device before designing for larger screens. Most websites have taken the opposite approach – design for the desktop first then (hopefully!) test and fix the site for mobile. While that may work in many cases, if you can redesign your website using mobile first best practices, that is ideal.
Taking a mobile first approach requires that you prioritize mobile visitors and ensure they have a quality experience. Once you have ensured that mobile experience, you then scale the design up to larger screens.
Further reading:
If you want to email a large number of recipients, you must use an email service provider. With the amount of spam being sent, many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will block emails that have too many recipients in the cc or bcc fields. In order to ensure your emails reach your intended audience, you should signup for a reputable email service provider, build your email list on that provider and use it to email to your list.
I recommend either MailChimp or MailerLite for a couple of reasons:
Both MailChimp and MailerLite offer an “RSS-Driven campaign” which sends your blog posts to your subscribers when your RSS feed is updated with new information. This gives you the all-important “subscribe by email” for your blog posts. For their free accounts:
- MailChimp gives you 500 subscribers and 1000 emails per month
- MailerLite gives you 1000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month
If you would like to understand the differences between email marketing and marketing automation, check out my blog post Marketing Automation vs Email Marketing.
Further reading:
There are several benefits that a small business will realize if you implement a quality content marketing strategy. It will:
- Increase digital footprint that gives you long-term visibility
- Generate leads more cost-effectively that other methods and deliver a high ROI
- Build trust and awareness in your target audience
- Provide the foundation for SEO
- Increase your social media following
- Deliver value with no strings attached
Further reading:
Why Content Marketing is Important for Small Business Growth
Using paid advertising as a marketing channel to reach your target audience has always been a strategy for many businesses. However, paid advertising can be rather expensive and prohibitive to a small business.
When the internet became a major marketing channel, paying for advertising on various platforms such as Google Ads, social media advertising and other platforms lowered the bar and made it possible for small businesses to utilize this strategy.
PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is an advertising model where you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. In a PPC marketing campaign, you bid on specific keywords relevant to your products and services. When a user searches using these keywords, your ad appears prominently in the search results or on relevant websites. You manage your PPC campaigns through platforms like Google Ads, Bing Ads, and social media advertising networks.
PPC offers several benefits that a business may find valuable:
- Immediate visibility
- Precise targeting
- Measurable
- Levels the playing field
This makes it ideal for businesses seeking quick results and have the budget to invest in paid advertising. Learn more before you decide.
Further reading:
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